Contested Squares: Social Uprising and Political Imaginaries in the Age of Neoliberal Crisis

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As part of the Contested Spaces forum taking place in the Crossing at Central Saint Martins; the round table discussion on Thursday 19th June 2014 will discuss Consent / Tension asking why urban spaces become crucial in facilitating social protests and how the production of these spaces as contested is related to urban imaginaries and contested futures.Speakers: Orsalia Dimitriou, Giulia Carabelli, Carl Fraser
Under system-wide conditions of neoliberal crisis within Europe, urban space has re-emerged as a central site of political contestation. Through a roundtable discussion concerning the social uprisings within Athens, London and Mostar, the discussants will bring their existing corpus of evidence-based research to bear on the question of how and why public space is mobilised in the context of state-crisis. In particular, these movements’ renewed emphasis on a revitalised discourse and practice of citizen democracy injects a sense of urgency into the re-appropriation of public squares, as spaces that are transformed beyond mere physical locations and into the symbolic locus of new imaginaries and aspirations for a rejuvenated ‘body politic’.